This course provides an overview of the 4-field discipline of Anthropology. Each of the four fields is covered in order to provide students with a broad-based introductory knowledge of Anthropology. The four topics include Archaeology (the study of the material remains of the past), Cultural Anthropology (the study of human diversity), Physical Anthropology (the study of the human body and human evolution), and Linguistics (the study of language).
This course will highlight themes in contemporary anthropology such as stigma, gender, structural violence, inequality, and emphasize why looking at disease in the past is relevant and critical to the modern world. This course will explore the record and human experience of health, disease, and pandemics from an anthropological perspective. We will begin with a focus on the past as evidenced by historical/archaeological data before shifting to socio-cultural and medical anthropological framings of disease, illness, wellness, and suffering, all while maintaining attention to differing scales of disease experience (population, household, individual).